It all started with a dare written on a t-shirt. In the summer of 1993, three guys from the Wharton School of Business drove to a sports trade show in Chicago with a business plan and a trunk full of big ideas. The business plan flopped. But at a deep-dish pizza place that weekend, they pulled out a napkin and started scribbling basketball trash talk. Things that playground ballers actually said. Things no brand had ever put on a shirt.
Within six weeks, they were selling t-shirts. Within a year, they had $1.7 million in revenue. Within eight years, they had $285 million in revenue and were the second-largest basketball brand in the United States, behind only Nike. Then they sold the company, walked away, and watched it slowly disappear.
The rise and fall of AND1 is one of the most instructive brand stories in American business history. Not because it ended badly, but because the reasons it worked so spectacularly are the same reasons it could not survive a change in ownership. It is a story about identity, culture, and what happens when you build something real, then hand it to someone who only sees the numbers.
They Weren’t Marketers. They Were Ballers Who Happened to Know Business.
Jay Coen Gilbert, Seth Berger, and Tom Austin didn’t start AND1 because they saw a gap in the athletic apparel market. They started it because they loved basketball and they were frustrated that no brand was speaking to the people they played with.
Nike, Adidas, and Reebok were spending millions on star athletes and polished campaigns. Nobody was talking to the guy showing up at the park every Saturday morning, the one who had been working on his crossover for three years and would trash talk you into next week. Nobody was giving a voice to the culture that actually lived and breathed basketball, the street game.
AND1 spoke directly to that person. The brand name itself tells you everything, it is the phrase shouted when you hit a bucket while getting fouled. The shirts said things like “Pass. Save yourself the embarrassment.” and “You Reach, I Teach.” These were not focus-grouped slogans. They were things people said regularly on courts across urban communities.
Foot Locker picked up the shirts in their first year. By year two, AND1 was in 1,500 stores nationwide. The trash talk tees became a phenomenon because they gave people something that transcended product. They gave them identity. As Berger later described it, the mission was to allow people who looked in the mirror and saw a basketball player to say: I’m a ballplayer.
That idea, belonging through shared identity, became the engine of everything AND1 built after it.
A Tape Nobody Was Supposed to See Changed Everything
In 1994, a basketball coach from Queens named Marquise Kelly sent a VHS tape to AND1’s office. It was grainy. The audio was rough. But it showed a teenage point guard named Rafer Alston doing things with a basketball that most people had never seen outside of a Harlem court. The tape sat on a shelf for four years.
Then, in 1998, AND1 was looking for a way to market its new Latrell Sprewell shoe after a traditional TV campaign failed to move the needle. Someone remembered the tape. They edited it. They started showing it at events. Crowds went wild.
AND1 made 50,000 copies and distributed them at basketball camps and clinics over the next eight weeks. Then they partnered with FootAction and made it even simpler: buy any pair of shoes, get the tape for free. Within three weeks, 200,000 copies were in circulation. The tape (which everyone just called “the Skip tape” after Alston’s nickname “Skip to My Lou”) had become the first known sports mixtape in history.
This happened in 1999. There was no YouTube. No Instagram. No algorithm pushing content to the right audience. AND1 did it manually, by understanding exactly who their customer was and meeting them where they already gathered.
The Skip tape did not just sell shoes. It launched a movement.
The Mixtape Tour: Virality Before Virality Existed
Off the success of the first tape, AND1 built a team. Not an NBA team, a streetball team. They found the most electrifying playground players in the country, guys like Philip “Hot Sauce” Champion, Grayson “The Professor” Boucher, AO, Helicopter, Half Man Half Amazing. They put them on tour. And they filmed all of it.
The AND1 Mixtape Tour became one of the most creative marketing vehicles in sports history. In city after city, AND1 would show up at a local court, hold an open run, and let local ballers compete against their street legends. The best from that open run would earn a spot on the next leg of the tour. It created local heroes. It created community. It created content.
They also kept making the tapes, eventually releasing 10 volumes between 1998 and 2008. The tapes flew off shelves at Foot Locker, Best Buy, and record stores. Kids memorized the moves. Courts across America started looking a little more like the AND1 mixtape.
Meanwhile, on the product side, the business was exploding. In 2000, Vince Carter wore AND1’s Tai Chi shoes in the Slam Dunk Contest, widely considered the greatest dunk contest performance in NBA history, then appeared on the cover of Slam Magazine. AND1 sold over a million pairs of that shoe. In 2004, Chauncey Billups won the NBA Finals MVP in AND1 Rises. By 2001, the company had $285 million in annual revenue and had signed Kevin Garnett.
For a brief, electric window of time, AND1 was the second-biggest basketball brand on earth. Nike was the only brand ahead of them.
When a Brand Loses the Thing That Made It Real
In 2005, the founders sold AND1 to American Sporting Goods. Berger and Gilbert left shortly after the sale. Austin had already departed in 2003. What followed is a familiar story in business, but it is painful every time. A new owner acquires a brand because they see the revenue. They do not always see, or know how to protect, the culture that generated it. AND1’s magic was never in the manufacturing. It was in the community. The mixtapes. The open runs. The feeling that this brand understood something about basketball that Nike never would, because it came from the street rather than arriving there by advertising budget.
Without the founders who built that community, the brand drifted. American Sporting Goods was sold to Brown Shoe Company in 2011. Brown quickly divested AND1 to Galaxy Brands. By 2021, AND1 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company that had been second only to Nike went from empire to footnote in less than two decades.
AND1 still exists today (it is been restructured under Galaxy Universal), but it occupies a very different position than the one it held at the peak. The mixtapes remain cultural artifacts. The players from the tour are remembered with genuine reverence. But the era itself? It is over. And the lesson it left behind is sharp enough to cut.
What AND1 Understood That Most Brands Still Don’t
It is tempting to look at AND1’s story and reduce it to a cautionary tale about what happens when founders leave. That is part of it, but the more important lesson lives in the rise, not the fall.
AND1 did not succeed because they outspent Nike. They succeeded because they made their audience feel seen before anyone else did. The trash-talk shirts were not marketing, they were a mirror. The mixtapes were not advertising, they were proof. AND1 found the people that the establishment had overlooked and said, “We see your game. We built this for you.”
That kind of loyalty cannot be manufactured. It has to be earned, brick by brick, over years of showing up at the right courts with the right energy. AND1 did that. And for a decade, they owned one of the most devoted audiences in American sports.
What they built with the mixtape is also a case study in distribution over destination. They did not wait for people to come to them. They put the product directly in the hands of their audience, at the places their audience already gathered. Before algorithms, before influencer marketing, and before social media, AND1 figured out the most important rule in attention economics is to go where attention already is.
200,000 tapes in three weeks through a shoe store partnership. There is a version of that strategy available to every small business with a clear picture of who their customer is and where they spend their time.
The other thing AND1 got right (and this one matters for any brand trying to build something sustainable) is that their marketing and their product were saying the same thing. The shirts, the shoes, the tapes, the tour. They all communicated the same identity. That consistency is what made the brand feel real. Authenticity is not a vibe or a filter. It is what happens when every touchpoint aligns.
Key Takeaways
- Know who you are building for, and say it plainly. AND1’s earliest shirts were not clever marketing. They were a direct statement to a specific person. The more precisely you define your audience, the more powerfully your message lands.
- Go where attention already is. AND1 did not build an audience from scratch. They showed up at basketball camps, clinics, and Foot Locker checkout lines. Identify the places your customers already gather and meet them there.
- Distribution is as important as the product. The Skip tape could have stayed on a shelf. It was the decision to put it in people’s hands, for free, that created the flywheel. Removing friction from your best content or your best offer is a strategy.
- Authenticity is alignment, not attitude. AND1’s brand felt real because every element, such as product, marketing, community events, brand voice, told the same story. Authenticity breaks down when your messaging and your product are pointing in different directions.
- Culture is the moat. Protect it accordingly. AND1’s competitive advantage was not the shoes. It was the community that grew up around the brand. When the people who understood and protected that culture left, the brand became hollow. The moat dried up.
FAQs About AND1
Why did AND1 fail after such a strong run?
AND1’s decline is ultimately a story about what gets lost in an acquisition when the founders leave. But the seeds were planted earlier — when Nike launched its Freestyle campaign in the early 2000s, directly targeting the streetball culture AND1 had spent a decade building. The world’s biggest sports brand had noticed, and came with unlimited resources. AND1’s market share took a significant hit. By 2005, the founders sold the company and walked away. Without the people who understood and protected the culture at its core, the brand changed hands multiple times and was unable to replicate the grassroots energy of the Mixtape Tour era. By 2021, AND1 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. It still exists, but as a fraction of its former self.
What made the AND1 mixtape such a breakthrough marketing idea?
The AND1 mixtape worked because it gave value before asking for anything in return. At a time when sports marketing meant expensive TV spots featuring established stars, AND1 put a free VHS tape in people’s hands at basketball camps and shoe stores. The tapes were genuinely entertaining. Not ads, but content people wanted to watch and share. That combination of generous distribution and high entertainment value made them spread like word-of-mouth, years before social media made that kind of sharing easy.
What marketing lessons can small businesses take from AND1?
AND1’s playbook doesn’t require a $285 million budget. The principles scale down remarkably well. Define your audience precisely. Find the spaces, physical or digital, where they already gather. Show up with something genuinely useful or entertaining before you ask them to buy. And make sure everything your business puts out tells the same story. AND1’s rise is proof that a small, focused brand with real cultural credibility can compete against giants, as long as it refuses to stop being itself.
At Resolution Promotions, we believe the best marketing tells a true story about who you are and who you serve, long before it asks for anything. If you are ready to build something that lasts, let’s talk.
